1.2. CSS to the Rescue

Of
course, the problem of polluting HTML with presentational markup was
not lost on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It
was recognized early on that this situation couldn't continue
forever, and that a good solution was needed quickly. In 1995, they
started publicizing a work-in-progress called CSS. By 1996, it had
become a full Recommendation, with the same weight as HTML itself.

So what does CSS offer us? As of this writing, it offers us two
levels of itself. The first level is Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1
(CSS1), which was made
a full W3C Recommendation in 1996. Soon thereafter, the W3C's
Cascading Style Sheets and Formatting Properties
(CSS&FP) Working
Group got to work on a more advanced specification, and in 1998 their
work paid off when Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2
(CSS2) was made a full
Recommendation. CSS2 builds on CSS1 by extending the earlier work
without making major changes to it.